07.10.2008

Comparison: Pausing/Resuming VM with VMWare and VirtualBox

This comparison was done on a Samsung X20 laptop. (So on bigger machines the numbers will look different!).Some words to the different concepts of VMWare and VirtualBox:

VMWare:

Pausing: Freezing all processes & hibernating the VM

Resuming: -

VirtualBox:

Pausing: Freezing all processes

Save machine state: Hibernating the VM

Restoring: Reverse function of Save machine state

Resuming: Reverse function of Pausing

These differences show, that with VirtualBox, you are able to only freeze all processes and resume them without any I/O for persistency of this state. This is done immediately.The other transitions last about 9s on VMWare and 5s on VirtualBox (Linux VM with 256MB RAM and no workload).